Then I discovered that Rush Limbaugh was on during the three hours beginning at noon. After about five minutes of listening to him hurl raw meat to the credulous, I was right back up to snuff. Sometimes I’d even grab two bundles of shingles and head up the ladder with them.

Those days are gone now, but I still can have roughly the same experience in the cardiovascular room at the gym, where between two and ten of us at once have the option of reading or watching a big-screen TV while exercising. Because the early-morning crowd likes the Vermont news, the set is usually tuned to Channel 3, CBS. But by the time I get there, it’s Dr. Phil, a show that ought to come with a warning label: Could be hazardous to your mental health. So I holler for a change, and often as not, the trainer in attendance switches it to the Fox Channel. This has the same effect that Rush used to have, with the additional benefit that I can track the actual rise in my heart rate by the little display on the screen in front of me. The sharp young Fox commentators (who seem to be unable to let anybody finish a sentence) can in less than five minutes raise my pulse from about 135 to 145 – beyond the recommended range for my age. I love it!

I can’t help but notice, however – and this is generally true of all the “news” channels – the contempt for the intelligence and attention span of American viewers implicit in the never-ending chatter primarily about the two Democratic candidates still standing. Did she really dodge bullets in Bosnia, or did she exaggerate? Why didn’t he quit that church? How will this affect the Hispanic, African-American, Christian right, gun-owning; gay/lesbian (pick any) constituency? And from the response of the viewers, it appears the networks’ contempt may be justified.

Because there are far larger and more important issues crying for attention and responses from our candidates for the Presidency. The nitwit invasion and tenuous occupation of Iraq, for example; the hemorrhaging national debt; the loss of respect for our nation around the world; the lack of health insurance for millions of our fellow citizens (“Of course we can’t afford a European-style health plan,” said one young lady on the Fox Channel, “because our military budget is covering the backsides of all those countries.” Doh!) Trouble is, most of us would rather gossip about the candidates than wade through dreary problems with no easy solutions.

I consider the most important issue none of the above. This past week I experienced a sort of harmonic convergence of nightmares. First, in the March 24 issue of The New Yorker (the one with ex-Governor Spitzer’s underdrawers on the cover), I read “Exposure – The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. The piece details (with photographs) the abuse, occasionally fatal, of the inmates of that notorious prison, inmates who the guards and Military Intelligence assume are guilty just because they’re there. Prisoners beaten to death are given death certificates claiming heart failure, and there is apparently a crematory at one end of the building. “But hey, you’re at war,” says a Sergeant Davis. “Suck it up or drive on.”

The other half of this convergence was a film that Mother, having watched it, insisted I watch also. Other People’s Lives. Set in East Germany before the fall of the Wall, it was bound to be dreary. Far from it; only the Stalin-era architecture and automobiles turned out to be dreary. The film’s plot details the state surveillance of a playwright suspected of being an “enemy of the state.” His apartment is bugged with multiple microphones. Two agents listening in shifts in an attic space above type out précis of his conversations and activities.

The agency performing the surveillance is the infamous Stasi – short for Staatssicherheit, or State Security. The Soviet bloc countries were notorious for their obsession with security and fear of ideas and behavior that suggested anything but strict devotion to the interests of the Party. They saw enemies and threats everywhere, and persuaded a majority of their citizens to obey quietly and, in many cases, inform on people they suspected of subversion. Fear was the motivation – fear of outsiders, fear of standing out in the crowd, and fear of the Stasi. People were put on watch lists, and often subsequently disappeared, for interrogation and torture, imprisonment or exile. As in the United States in the 1950s, many artists were blacklisted and cut off from friends and jobs. In the end, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Wall – built to keep people from fleeing to the West – came down; and the millions of formerly secret security files were opened to the public. They make fascinating reading, but like the transcripts of the McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, reveal more about the questioners than the citizens investigated.

State Security. I mused upon the name. Sounds like Homeland Security: that unbelievably vast, expensive, and dysfunctional bureaucracy that can’t handle the aftermath of natural disasters, can’t stop a significant amount of contraband at airports; yet, in conjunction with the CIA and other counterespionage agencies, is slowly tightening the screws on the one unique thing in the United States worth fighting for: our personal freedoms. Half our nation believes Homeland Security’s fearful scenarios and supports the work it’s doing to “keep us safe.” The other half fear we’ve created a monster that will slowly erode our freedoms until many of us have forgotten how precious it once was. This should not raise our heart rate, but, rather, send a chill down our spine.